Spending Down: budget cuts shut down OTA

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The first head on the Congressional
budget chopping block is about to roll. The Office of
Technology Assessment(OTA) closes its doors Friday.

The OTA has been zeroed into bureaucratic oblivion, 23 years
after its birth. "It does give you sort of an empty feeling
in the pit of your stomach to know that something you thought
was important is not there any more," said OTA Director Roger
Herdman.

OTA is a bipartisan Congressional research agency,
specializing in science and technology.

Roughly half of the 200 employees have found other jobs. The
rest are getting severance pay.

Key Senate Appropriations Committee Republican Connie Mack
argues that Congress is drowning in information and won't
miss the OTA. "When we started looking at it, we realized we
have the Congressional Research Service, the Library of
Congress that can provide us with information," said Mack.

At OTA, predictably, there's not a lot of respect for Mack's
point of view. "I think at this point, most of the people in
the building think it's an embarrassment more than anything
else. I mean the rest of the world seems to respect this
institution. Congress apparently doesn't," said Gerald
Epstein of OTA.

One lawmaker, New York Republican Amo Houghton, fought
valiantly for the agency but said OTA was a budget line
without a constituency. "It's small, it's sort of
cloistered, it does far-out research rather than immediate
term personal human research and those are the things that
you just say, get rid of, it's a scalp," said
Houghton.

As the final hour drew near, OTA workers were clearing desks,
organizing mailing lists, packing boxes in offices where so
many of them had spent so much of their lives.

Others were putting the finishing touches on final reports.
But all seemed unfailingly good-humored. "Maybe it's
because we're all somewhat manic about the end here but it's
been a good run," said Robert Friedman of OTA.

Shutting down OTA will save about $22 million a year. To put
it in perspective, the government spends about $1.5 trillion
a year, $3 million a minute. If the federal budget were a
clock, the OTA budget amounted to just seven minutes.